The Dev Masterclass Series: The “How the Hell Do I Choose App Store Keywords” Guide

Posted on October 22, 2014
By Evaldo Rossi, Guest AuthorGuest Author

One of the most
important tools of your app marketing campaign (with or without paid
acquisition) is Keyword Optimization (KWO). With it, you'll improve your
keyword pool, i.e., the collection of words on your app's metadata that are
scanned by search engines.

Choosing great keywords
and key-phrases takes time, and you have to make a considerable list of words
and phrases that are somehow related to your app. The list should have hundreds
and thousands of key-phrases and keywords.

After you've
brainstormed your list, it is time to filter the bad terms out and choose your
final set of keywords. Pay attention and take your time to make a great
selection. The keywords you choose will impact directly on your app’s exposure,
downloads, and, therefore, revenue.

Selecting your Keywords and Key-phrases

There are several
methods out there to choose keywords. The one that worked best for me is the
straightforward, three-step Relevance,
Competition and Volume method, and I'll show you how you can do it and why
you should do it.

Step One: Relevance

If you have to learn one
thing from reading this article, it's this: relevance is king. Period.

The single most
important aspect to consider in keyword selection is relevance. Without
relevance, you get no conversion, no matter how great your app, icon,
screenshots, or video previews are.

Imagine the following
situation: you search for a "golf assistant app" and the third app
you see is an ice hockey game. Unless you love any sport that is about hitting
balls with sticks—in that case, you should try baseball too, I heard it's
awesome—you wouldn't download it.

People want to download
what they are looking for. It's that simple.

And this is cool,
because users who downloaded your app from the search results are usually after
apps with the highest quality. They were looking for your app, after all. They
just didn't know it yet.

Since you don't get
downloads from keywords or key-phrases with no relation to your app, don't waste
your time using them. Even if you do get them, user quality will be low: they
won't engage or spend on your app.

So, how do you know a
keyword is relevant? Basically, you will know if the keyword or key-phrase is
relevant if it falls in one of the following categories:

Theme: They define the look and feel of your app

Functionality: They explain what your app does

Mechanics: They explain how your app does it

Context: They explain where and when your app should
be used.

Put yourself in the
user's shoes: what am I expecting when searching for that key-phrase? Ask people
if necessary, or Google it and analyze the results. Is your app related to the
results?

Step Two: Competition

After you boiled down
your list to relevant keywords and key-phrases, you have to check the
competition. Your goal here, after all, is for users to discover your app.
However, for keywords with robust competition, you are not likely to appear in
the first 10 or 20 positions in the search results, which is as far as most
users are expected to go on iOS 8.

Evaluating competition
is hard because it's relative to the strength of your app or marketing budget.
If you're going barehanded in advertising, relying on App Store Optimization (ASO)
alone, start by looking at keywords with weak competition. Make sure you'll
rank high for them just with organic downloads. Look for apps with similar
theme, functionality, or production values and see how they performed for this
keyword or key-phrase.

If you're going to make
a strong paid user acquisition campaign at launch, you can use keywords with
stronger competition. If you think you can't rank among the top 10 apps for
that keyword or key-phrase, cut it out. Don't hesitate. If people can't find
your app through it, the key-phrase is worthless to you.

With this step, you will
probably cut most of your keywords, leaving only key-phrases. It's hard on
today's app store to find good keywords with low competition. That's not a problem,
though, since there are a lot of good niches with key-phrases.

How do you check
competition? The most obvious way is to look at some "competition" or
"difficulty" data from the keyword research service you're using. I
prefer to actually see the apps myself, just to be sure.

Search the App Store for
each keyword and key-phrase you're aiming for. Look at the top 10 apps and ask
yourself these questions:

Are
these apps popular and/or famous?
You probably won't be able to compete with Minecraft, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood,
or Boom Beach.

Do
they look better than yours?
You might need to improve your marketing material, such as screenshots, the app
icon, or even create a nice app video preview.

How
good are their ratings? Look
at the average current rating and the current ratings they have. An app with
thousands of current ratings and an average of 4.5+ is very hard to beat. You
can use this data as a download estimate: lots of ratings and a recent update
mean that the app got all those ratings in a very short time, therefore it has
lots of downloads.

How
big are their publishers? Are
they giant multimillionaire companies? Even if you beat them in the rankings
and search positions, these guys usually have a lot of money to invest in
marketing and will most likely retake lost positions in the long run.

Step Three: Traffic

After you have come up
with relevant key-phrases with competition you can handle, choose the ones with
the largest traffic/search volume. Look at Google Trends, Google Keyword
Planner, or your favorite App Store Optimization tool; all of them have data
for search volume.

Choose the top one or two
key-phrases and try to place them in your App Name, since it has more weight in
the search results ranking algorithm, and you will rank higher for it. But do
it in a way that your app name makes sense when reading it. A keyword-stuffed
looking name, like “Adventure Candy King: Clash of the Titan Clans – Amazing
Puzzle Power Magic Game with Golden Hero”, will probably get your app rejected by Apple.

Remember: this step has
the lowest priority. Don't look at search volume until you have filtered your
list by relevance and competition.

After you've chosen all
key-phrases and keywords you want to use, you're ready to place them in the
app's metadata. The search engine looks for keywords on the App Name, Keywords,
In-App Purchase Display Name, and Publisher Name fields. You're probably too
late for the last one, but distribute your keyphrases among the rest of them.

Pay attention to how
you're allocating the keywords used in key-phrases. If you don't know how to do
it, read this guide and understand how key-phrases work on the App Store.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, Keyword
Optimization is Relevance, Competition, and Traffic, in that order.

Keyword research takes
time, so don't rush through filtering and choosing or your work could go to
waste. This is something that will directly influence your download numbers, so
take your time and do it right.

If you're working with
paid acquisition through ad campaigns, you might want to read this article to
understand how Keyword Optimization
and, therefore, App Store Optimization,
can drive your effective cost per install (eCPI) down.

This is just my favorite
method for choosing keywords, though.
What other methods do you use to choose keywords?